


The Useless Seed is Sown

by orphan_account



Category: AFI
Genre: Angst, M/M, baby punk Davey and Jade, college fic, highschool fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-06
Updated: 2013-11-06
Packaged: 2017-12-31 17:16:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,380
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1034284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You haven't seen each other like this in four years.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Useless Seed is Sown

**Author's Note:**

> This story might as well be called Intervention part deux. It's not a sequel, though, just another example of my glorious ability to recycle themes about the past because of my glorious ability to recycle my own past. I'll probably be writing and writing this theme as long as I live, though. Because we're constantly writing our pasts. It's the only thing we can write. This is about the liminal space between having once known someone and knowing them again, when you're shoring up your past conception of them with the new thing they are.
> 
> I don't own them and none of this ever happened.

He has somewhere to be at six. You don’t think much of it when he tells you, but now you know that is the variable that changes everything. 

“Some family dinner bullshit,” he explains when you’re still skating at the new park at Western and Fifth, trying to replicate the things you used to do together even though the years have changed you and you’re different people now. “I don’t want to go, but I have to.” He says.

You know you’re a sucker for expiration dates, but it’s too hot for you to really put any weight on this one, not right now anyway. The sun beats down on your like angry palms, and you think about how little you’re feeling, how little his presence stirs up in you. His presence once longed for and then forcefully forgotten when two years turned into three and you decided you were too old to be pining after Jade Puget.

You wipe sweat from your brow with a bandanna, knowing your face is bright red and there’s a mustache of perspiration beading on your upper lip. 

“Yeah, okay.” You tell him, shrugging, kicking your skate up into your dirty hand. 

\---

He says he doesn’t trust you to drive, that he never will, but he’s the one who keeps getting lost. It’s like college filled his brain up with so many facts and statistics and radical ideas that he just lost the room for Ukiah street names. For North, South, East, West, basic stuff. 

“You can let me, you know. I come home more often than you do,” You remind him, but he shakes his head, grinning at you. 

“Not in a million years.” He brakes too hard, then holds his arm out across the passenger side to keep you from slamming into the dashboard. 

“Safety arm,” you say automatically, because it was a thing you both used to say together whenever he braked too hard, back before you drove and you were both just kids. He doesn’t say it with you, just looks at you with wide eyes, startled. 

\---

You sometimes wonder if he even remembers the shit that happened between you, or if college took that, too. For the last four years you’ve both been living in Berkeley, you making music, breathingliving music while he finished his degree and you hardly _talked_ because it felt like you were living in parallel but separate dimensions, the same city, different worlds. And you would think, wonder, _does he even remember me? Does he know that I loved him? That I still think about him?_

But now, today, you can feel it crackling between you, the secret-quiet shared history. And you can sense its potential the second you climb into the car with him and he reaches for you, holds you tight and pushes his face into your neck in hug and you wonder _god, when was the last time we hugged like this? Have we ever hugged like this?_ You feel it, but you don’t let yourself think about what it could mean. You refuse to have expectations. You refuse everything but whatever is happening in this moment. This is the safest way to exist around him, you think. 

\---

But then, you can’t help but notice. The whole day the way you touch each other is strange. Your knees slide together when you sit on the half-pipe and watch the kids wipeout. You keep reaching over and smoothing his hair in back, and he let you. The whole thing is a pretend game. It seems playful, friendly. Or, it would be if you weren’t you and he wasn’t Jade. It wold be normal between you and some other old friend, you touch your friends a lot, you’re a hugger and a cuddler and all that. Now you’re both acting like he’s some other old friend but you also both know he’s not. 

So when he says “It’s too hot to do anything but swim. Let’s go back to my place,” you know he remembers. He looks at you sidelong, a terrible impression of nonchalance, the the truth, bright and unnamed, shining through the cracks like molten lava through tectonic plates. 

\---

The last time you were at Jade’s house was the last time you kissed him. Some high school graduation pool party. People dared you to do that shit together all the time, and you did, and maybe it wasn’t a big deal for him but it was for you. And then that night, when everyone was drinking inside and playing nintendo but you two were still outside for some reason, alone, he pinned you to the edge of the pool and kissed you when no one was watching. It felt like a dam breaking. Like an avalanche. 

You remember everything about it. How it seemed like a mistake, something he didn’t want to do but couldn’t stop himself from doing anyway. You remember the rush of control, the way his skin felt in the water, the smell of the sprinklers on his front lawn, the night blooming jasmine creeping up the concrete wall behind you, the endlessness you felt from knowing it was probably the end. 

That night you stayed over after everyone else was gone, and things that weren’t sex but were almost sex happened. There were a few other times after that, during the summer. All isolated, unplanned for, life-changing. He was always freaked out and trying to stop himself, you always wanted more. Then, in August, Jade left. 

A few years later, you learned to stop feeling feelings about that. 

\---

Now. “I haven’t been to your house in like...four years.” You say. “It’s weird. Old memories.” 

You’re talking without actually talking, saying things under the surface. He nods, eyes sparkling and you wonder how this can be happening now when you already decided it wasn’t a thing you could think about, when you already killed it, cut it out of your stupid young body. 

“Yeah,” He answers, braking too hard and reaching for you with an open palm. “No problem. We’ll just make new memories.” 

You don’t want new memories. You’re satisfied with the incomplete tragedy of your youth together, the heartbreak and the way you’ve come to terms with this new Jade who is nothing like the old Jade, changed by college and the city and all the girls he’s probably fucked. You don’t need to rewrite history, but you wonder if he does. If leaving someone is different than being left. 

\---

You borrow swim trucks from him; they’re too big. He double knots the draw string for you upstairs, his hands close enough to your body that you should be feeling something, but you’re not. _It’s dead_ you think. _Heart’s stopped_. 

His house isn’t big but it feels that way when no one’s home, and your voices echo in the kitchen. It reminds you of the nights you slept over four years ago, when he would quit kissing you in his bed to run downstairs and check his sister’s and his parent’s rooms to make sure no one was home, because he was that paranoid. 

Now, he bends down over the eight track player, trying to decide that to play. “Hey, we can put on your band,” he says, raising his eyebrows. 

You shake your head. You hate the sound of your own voice on the recordings. “No. Bad idea.” 

He shrugs, and throws on Neurosis. You watch him unguardedly for a few moments while he fiddles with the needle, and notice all the ways he’s different. His thrown back shoulders, his general air of confidence, the hatred of his skin somehow _gone_ , the constant shifty awkwardness you remember from high school lost along with the extra teenage-weight. He’s lanky and adult now, graceful and unafraid of you. All the power you remember having is gone, too. 

You wonder if you actually killed everything you felt for him, or if he’s just so unrecognizable your body thinks this is a new person. 

\---

You jump in the pool, and he follows, almost landing on you. You drown a little as he surfaces, waves licking nervously at the cement sides. Then his hands are on your shoulders, pushing you under. 

Skin slides together, wet and slick, and you’re not yet sure if this is something you remember. Every other person you’ve kissed since you were sixteen has reminded you distantly of kissing Jade. You wonder if kissing Jade will remind you distantly of these other people. You realize as you kick above water and see his laughing mouth, that you are thinking about kissing him. You decide it’s okay because thinking about something is different than expecting it. 

You’re both touching the other too much. He wraps his awkwardly long legs around your waist even though you’re shorter than him, makes you carry him. Your hand instinctively stabilizes him on the underside of his thigh, and you apologize for touching him there in this white, hairy, intimate place you have never before touched someone you weren’t about to blow. He laughs again, shakes his head.

He lets you go, swims away, and you don’t know why, but you follow him. 

\---

His little brother’s pool toys are floating half-deflated in the water, and he swims between them, blowing them up. You stare at the back of his head, his wet, messy dark hair with the gel dribbling out of it. Once the dolphin is back to its rightful shape you paddle it to the stairs and climb on, clumsy and awkward. It’s colder outside the water than in it. 

Now that you’re not touching him, you want to be. You kick water at him, feeling stupid for pushing this not-imaginary thing between you when it’s so obvious, it’s so clearly going to happen. You wonder if you’ll have to start it, or if he will. You wonder why you want it to happen, it if it’s just something to do or if there is some truly genuine desire inside you, four years old and shaped like the summer before Jade left. You kick some more water, and he reaches back with those insanely long arms, huge hands, and capsizes your dolphin. 

\---

You feel him pushing you towards the wall, both of your bodies made buoyant by water, and you surface near the edge where he pins you, laughing like this is a game, like he has no ulterior motives. Your bodies are close and slick and you can’t even tell if you’re turned on yet because that’s how insane you are, how out of touch, how unsure about everything now that he’s this new person with eyes unclouded by fear. You wonder if you really did love him that summer, or if you just loved his terror.

Somehow the laughter fades and then you’re holding each other, which is definitely weird. You wouldn’t even do this with your other friends, and definitely not this long, and in silence. But you’re doing it with him, wondering if you’re both still playing at that charade of normalcy. Your heads nod together, wet hair and ears touching, skin to skin and he feels so _different_ under your hands, in the water. He smells different, too, a new cologne or deodorant or sunscreen or something. You inhale him, trying to find notes that make you feel, but inside you’re still a vacancy.

You both stay like that, paralyzed, arms around one another, legs twined. And then his mouth opens on your shoulder. 

\---

There are freckles, and white, and the water eddying between you, warm and wet. And then you’re looking at each other, and then you’re kissing. Neither of you starts or leans in or anything. Just one second you’re not kissing, then you are. His lips are warm and sweet and not how you remember because you realize with a brilliant clarity that don’t really remember anymore, even though it used to be the clearest thing in your memory, before it was replaced with this strange new reality, before you killed it until it was dead. 

His tongue. Your teeth. It’s all so easy and unmessy, this stylized, clean, sugar-glass version of the filthy desperate kissing you remember from when you were teenagers. His hands claw all over your bare back and thighs, his tongue hungrier and more insistent than you can make yours. You let him do whatever he wants to you. 

\---

You want it to mean something, to be like a dam breaking, but it’s not anymore. It will probably never be. You don’t feel the way you used to, like an avalanche under his hands, like this is could be the last time so you have to get your fill. You say his name in your head, you remind the shriveled shell of a sixteen year old inside of you that this is _him,_ it’s _Jade_ , dreamed of, longed for, loved, never forgotten even though you _tried_ /. And that used to mean something. 

But nothing changes. You keep kissing, easy, unmessy, unbeautiful and pool-wet. It’s better than kissing anyone else has been because he knows what he’s doing, but it’s not as perfect as you imagined it because nothing ever is. 

Still, the water keeps trying to take him away from you, but you don’t let it. 

\---

Your bodies grind together like two stones tumbling downstream. You touch him all over, trying hard to find a familiar stretch of skin but he’s lost so much weight in the last four years that every centimeter is new and uncharted. There are smooth planes and bones and muscles where you remember only fear, its hollowed out longing. His hair is long enough to pull, but not short enough to get in your mouth. It doesn’t feel like a memory. It doesn’t feel like anything. It is too natural to be exciting, and your hips lock like something old and known, antique keys in some almost forgotten attic. 

He picks you up and puts you on the edge of the pool like you’re made of air. Then you’re tilted back, scapula scraping against burning hot pavement as he pushes you into the ground, covers your body with his. And there, on the cement, you thrust against each other in your borrowed swimming trunks, grit sticking to wet skin, sun in your eyes. You drip, making a dark spot where you’re lying, and the licks your stomach, just above the waistband. It feels good, but not like magic, not like the world is ending. 

\---

Even though he’s on top and he’s the one whose driving this thing to wherever it’s going to go, he keeps saying “wait,” “wait” in a tiny, unconvincing voice.You’re not doing anything but lying underneath him getting sunburnt so you don’t know what you’re supposed to be waiting for. He’s kissing you everywhere, a tremor in his toned, freckled arms saying “wait.” 

“Okay,” you finally tell him, and he looks up at you, eyes stricken and not brown but nearly amber, flecked with green. You reach for his tattooed bicep with one hand, move his hair off his brow with the other. You are still stunned to know he can look at you this long without his face getting twisted with self doubt. “Okay.” 

\---

You’re back to holding each other, and you notice that you’re shaking, too. Your hair drips down your back, and you shiver. “Are you alright?” you ask, wondering if you broke something.

“Yeah,” he says, voice still small, but shaped the way words are shaped when they[re shaped around a smile. His hands trace your ribs, your jawline, smooth your hair. None of it feels desperate,or urgent, because you think that the desperation of your youth was a product of his fear. “Is this actually happening,” he says without a question mark tilting the end of it. He laughs hollowly, awed. Then, he says your name, which makes your stomach turn with the ghost of arousal more than anything else has. “We should wait,” he says, thumb on your lower lip

You wonder what he means, and if he means sex. And if he _does_ mean sex, why he wants to wait. If it’s because he has somewhere to be at six, or if it’s because this actually means something to him, that _you_ actually mean something to him, beyond loyalty to a four year old memory. 

You’re kind of touched by this maybe-reason, in spite of yourself. 

\---

Amazed, you notice you’re half hard even in your wet shorts, and you feel a little put out by this waiting shit only because you’ve been psyching yourself out for the last few minutes, telling yourself it’s not the end of the world if you fuck, it doesn’t make you pathetic or a bad person, but apparently you’re not fucking so that was all in vain.

It’s okay though, because you’re not supposed to have expectations about this. You’re not driving. You’re letting this happen. 

He pulls back and studies your face, looking beautiful because this might not be the same, and it might not be what you remember or what you want, but he will always be beautiful because he just is.“You keep looking at me,” you observe. 

“Yeah,” he says, and smiles, face bright and unafraid and you almost want him to not want to want this, so that he will look terrified, and you’ll feel something beyond this wall, this dam, this dead thing. 

\---

And again, you are kissing. Rolling around, burning your arms on the pavement, licking the dips and hollows of his clavicles and throat. His necklace, a thin silver chain with a saint christopher medal on it, keeps hitting your teeth. There are parts of your body that had fallen asleep that he’s waking up with his own skin, and you hurt as you come back to life under him. 

Then, his hand is sliding beneath the waistband of his shorts on your body, too-big with the knotted drawstring and his fingers are still chlorine-cold on your hot skin. He’s touching you there, and you’re hard. You don’t know how long you’ve been than way, but you are. 

You still, lying flat under his palm, panting. “What about waiting?” struggles out of your tight throat. 

“Pfft,” he says, and waves his free hand through the air between you like he’s brushing something away, eyes heavy lidded. “Can’t.” 

\---

And you think this is what you wanted. Not him to fuck you, (although his hand feels perfect and practiced where it’s touching you, jerking your dick like he’s jerked lots of dicks before) but him not being able to keep himself from fucking you. His inability to resist you, once in in spite of fear, now in spite of former protest, reminds you more of Old Jade than New Jade does. You wonder about all the guys he’s evidently fucked in college, what that means, if he told them about you, if they scared him as much as you did or if the fear was localized here, at home, in his backyard. 

Because you’re fair, you struggle with his swim trunks until you’re underneath, touching him where he’s warm, steel-hard, narrow. It’s not how you imagined he would feel here, four years ago when you still only had your own body for reference. He’s older and taller and back then you thought he would be bigger than you, but he’s not. You feel like you could close your entire hand around him. Everything moves in slow motion. His pendant rocks above you, catching sunlight, and you close your eyes. 

\---

Your breath is coming short and fast; you’re sweating because you’re under the sun and on top of scalding cement and there’s this lithe, toned body working above you, groaning and flickering like a flame in the wind. You remind yourself. You say his name in your head. 

And suddenly, you’re feeling. Too much. It hits you like a punch, heavy and solid in the gut and then you realize you could _cry_ right now, cry on his pale sweating shoulder, cry with his fingers around you and his dick spasming in your palm.

 _Fuck_ you think wildly, desperately. Your nails tighten on his back, and now you’re the one whose scared. 

\---

Maybe it’s the angle or maybe it’s the sudden tide of unexpected sensation crashing over your head, but your hands are going numb. Your legs are going numb. Your lungs are working harder than they need to and you’re a picture of arousal, the thrown back head, the red face, the body out of control. But you’re not aroused, or not only aroused. You’re lost. You’re not sure what’s happening, with his hips humping his dick into the pins and needles in your palm, with the small, high-pitched noises falling from his lips in your hair. _This is what you wanted_ your mind reminds you, and you correct it, _not really_. 

You come anyway. 

\---

He rolls off, wiping your jizz all over your own stomach, and it’s disgusting and burning hot so you stagger up, standing and shuddering, seeing stars in the glittery daylight. He follows you, eyes dark and dangerous-hungry. You’re backing away from him on weak legs but he moves faster until he’s pressing you against the wooden deck table. It bites into your back, scraping and splintery. You hold him off, palms open flat on his hard stomach, visibly shaking against his skin. “What time is it.” You say, hoarse. 

“I don’t want to think about that,” he says, hands all in your hair, on your cheeks, turning your flushed face back and forth like he’s surveying a piece of meat, some animal at an auction. “God you’re crazy beautiful,” he says in a low voice, and no one has ever called you that before, let alone the Jade you remember, the one who was mute and dark and violent when he looked at you. 

“Yeah, but. You have somewhere to be,” you remind him, breath still fast and terrifying in its lack of control, elbows bucking as he presses into you. Your stomachs are sticky with your come, smeared between your bodies like a sealant. 

“God. Yeah. You’re right. You’re responsible,” he says, reeling back a little, unconvincing. “Yeah, okay,” he says quietly, under his breath, to himself. And he can’t stop touching you, even though he’s clearly trying. He puts his hands, huge and white, on your shoulders and peels your torsos apart, braced an arm’s length away from you for around two seconds until he’s kissing you blind again, tonguing the roof of your mouth as you fall apart, dissolving into pool water and not memories, but a new thing. 

\---

“Fuck,” he says, wrenching away from your swollen, unbreathing mouth. There’s the bracing again, the stiff shuddering arms and the hands on the shoulders and the desperate tension stretched between the two of you like a desert. “We should really stop.” He looks straight at you. Sincere, unwavering. And there’s nothing left of the old Jade in his eyes. 

“Yeah,” you say, shakily, fists closing around this stranger’s forearms, making him keep his distance. The breath feels ripped out of your lungs and you stumble, light headed, turning around so you’re doubled over the deck table, heaving with your sweating palms flat. You don’t know why, but you can’t stop smiling. Your mouth convulses up at the corners, and up to the elbow you’re numb still, tingling and bloodless. He rubs his hard dick into the crack of your ass, hands roving up your chest, mouth all over your neck and shoulder, biting and fearless. 

\---

You smile and shake and sob as he comes against your back, shooting ribbons of white-wet fire onto your spine. His mouth is all over your ear and he groans into it, making you shiver and your knees buckle halfway to the ground, crumbling against the arm he has around your ribcage. And this is a storm, but it’s not the storm you wondered about, expected. You don’t know who you are right now, or who he is. 

Head bent, you stay that way for too long, thinking that things wouldn’t have happened like this is he didn’t have somewhere to be at six. You’re a sucker for expiration dates; the impending end makes mundane, normal things like sex desperate, rushed, feel like the last time. When things feel like they’re the last time, they bring back memories. 

“Fuck, he says again, and a rumble echoes through your empty self. 

\---

You’re not ruined because of him, or for him. He’s a stranger. You’re ruined because this feels like the last time, and that’s what breaks the dam, incites the avalanche. You wonder if there is such a thing as love, or only fucked up people with chemicals firing in their brains, fighting their tiny wars. You choke on chlorine, grinning in this crazy way that’s the farthest thing from funny. And he looks at you, and looks at you, eyes burning acid holes into your scapula, looking at you like you might leave, like you’re the one who leaves. 

He rubs a hand up your back, smearing his load. “We should stop,” he says again maybe just to say it, before spinning your dizzy body around and sealing your mouths together like he doesn’t know how to stop and he needs you to do it for him. 

\---

But you’re not sure you know how to, either. Not when it feels like the last time, and your body remembers what happened four years ago, and what it felt like to be left. You’re kissing back, because it’s better than smiling, or laughing, or crying, or whatever your flesh is trying to do. 

_No,_ you think, _this isn’t what I wanted_. Then you must admit that you didn’t know what you wanted. You never did. That is what it means to relinquish all expectations, to render yourself numb to something that was once everything. His hands dig trenches in your body. They plant new seeds. You wonder if you will water them, expose them to sunlight. You wonder if you even _can_. Still, he covers what he unearths, and you cling to him like you were clinging to the past.


End file.
